“Say again, sir?” I asked.
“Nothing.” I thought I heard a faint trace of amusement in his voice. “Get the grid for the farm from the TOC when you guys are ready. Whiteback out.”
I put my helmet back on, gave the Sons of Iraq fist pounds, and gave my mounted soldiers the “we’re rolling out of here, time now” hand-and-arm signal. Specialist Flashback dropped my vehicle’s ramp.
“How was dominoes, sir?” asked my driver, sleep still hanging off his question like an apostrophe.
“Dominoes?” I responded, indignantly. “I was off fighting the fight. Building trust with local leadership, boys, building trust. Heading off the insurgents’ offensive before they even got a chance to initiate their charge. Hell, think of the medals we earned today! And it’s not even lunchtime yet.”
Private First Class Smitty (recently promoted) and Private Hot Wheels giggled appreciatively from the back, but Sergeant Spade was unimpressed. “Lose again?”
“Sure did. Staff Sergeant Bulldog and Suge smoked us all.”
I felt my gunner smirking above me. “We’re redcon-1, sir.”
I put on my headset and conducted a radio check. “Embrace the frago,” SFC Big Country said from his vehicle. “Or it will embrace you.”
“Roger that,” I said.
“Get this, sir,” said SFC Big Country. “I heard muffled excitement coming from my driver’s hole, so I asked Specialist Prime, ‘What the hell are you reading up there, Playboy?’ He responded with, ‘No, Sergeant, Popular Mechanics.’”
“What can I say,” Specialist Prime said. “I like Popular Mechanics.”
My other Strykers reported their redcon status, and we started moving east. Back into sector and back to the mission and back to Iraq.
Approximately two kilometers later—a distance we covered in under five minutes—Boss Johnson II waited for us as our Strykers pulled up to the main entrance of his farmlands. He greeted me as I dismounted.
“The other Americans came last night,” he said through Suge. “In helicopters.”
“That is what I understand,” I responded. “Why would they have done that if your area is secure, as you claim?”
Even through Suge’s paraphrased Arabic, Boss Johnson II understood my not-so-subtle insinuations, and he stared back at me protractedly. Then he shrugged. “One of the men they took was one of my captains. The other was his brother. He was also Sahwa.”
Of course, I thought. He already knew what they were doing. No wonder he wasn’t more disturbed but still felt compelled to make a show of walking us in to assess the damage. I ignored the temptation to remind Boss Johnson II that he now had two openings on his security contract and matched his pace. Suge walked a half step behind us, and a section of Gravediggers, under the strict guidance of Staff Sergeant Boondock and Sergeant Cheech, fanned out around us in a diamond formation. Three minutes later, we reached the crest of a small hill and found the farm in question.
The first thing we noticed was the car. A modest station wagon was parked in the driveway, sharp pieces of glass glinting in the surrounding dirt. Every one of the windows was smashed in. One elderly Iraqi man, four women, and eight young children huddled in a group squat nearby, at the base of the farm’s main lodging. I took a few photos of the car, and at Boss Johnson II’s urging, the old man stood up and walked over to us.
“Salaam aleichem,” I said, taking off my gloves and sunglasses, remembering the basic lesson of some COIN class conducted long ago.
“Salaam.” The man was quite short, but unlike most Iraqis his age, he did not hunch his back. A red-and-white checkered turban and closely trimmed grey beard framed a rather unnerving face: With one chasm-black eye and one twitching blue eye the shade of a robin’s egg, he looked more like a classic jihadist than the affable old farmer with bad bloodlines Boss Johnson II had described.
“What happened last night?”
“It would be easier for me to show you,” he said, gesturing for us to follow him into his house. We did.
As expected, the house was trashed. Furniture lay overturned. Cabinets were unhinged. Clothes had been left in heaps on the ground. A poster of Mecca was torn off the wall, and three pieces of it sat on the ground. No rug was left unturned, no hiding place untouched. There was even the carcass of a small dog left in the backyard that, with the continual advance of the sun, was now completely infested with flies. The dog’s frozen scowl from the other side of eternity was still trying to alert the AQI brothers. When I asked the old man if he knew why the other Americans had done this to the house, he claimed he knew nothing of his brothers’ extracurricular activities.
“They treat us like sheep,” he said. “They put numbers on our backs and embarrass us in front of our wives and children.”
I felt for the guy; really, I did. He seemed harmless enough—and certainly clueless enough. But even though I hadn’t heard the full story—yet—I trusted that my countrymen didn’t tornado random houses without justification. Not now. Not five years into the war. Not after Abu Ghraib. Even they had to abide by certain rules. I asked the twitching blue eye if he was familiar with our repercussion funds program.
“I do not want money,” he replied matter-of-factly. “I want to know what my brothers did wrong, and I want my respect back.”
To color me shocked would have done a disservice to the power of crayons everywhere. I had never met an Iraqi who didn’t want to talk about money or the potential for financial imbursement. I certainly empathized with his hints about lost pride and internalized anger. That probably didn’t matter to him, though, and he had already made his needs and wants very clear. There was nothing left to do. I spoke a few more pretty, hollow words, took a few more notes, and snapped a few more photographs. Then I told the Gravediggers we were leaving. Private Das Boot still stared at the dead dog in the backyard. Corporal Spot’s bright blue eyes blinked continuously in bafflement, and even Staff Sergeant Boondock walked like a man eager to return to a part of the war zone that made sense.
As we came out of the house, the women and children remained squatting to our immediate left. Most of the women stared at the ground, but the youngest of them followed my soldiers’ brisk movements with the stare—something the children massed around her soon mimicked. I wasn’t the only one in our group who noticed this development.
“This is very bad situation, LT,” Suge said. “The kids do not know their fathers were Ali Babas. They do not know that Americans bring peace to their country. They only know that their dog is dead and their fathers are gone.”
I groaned. “I know, Suge,” I said. “I know.”
The elderly man, noticing the glares of his brothers’ wives and his nephews and nieces, began clucking and yelling at them in Arabic. They scattered behind us, disappearing to various corners of the farm. Boss Johnson II shook my hand, saying he’d come to the combat outpost later in the day to see us, and walked the other way to where he had parked his car.
Suge’s mind was still with the children as we moved to our Strykers. “They will grow up hating America!” he said, restating his point more clearly. “And they will be wrong, but that will not change anything.”
“Yeah.” I needed a Rip-It and some of Doc’s little white pills. “We call it the domino effect back home. This probably will be the defining moment of every one of those kid’s lives, and they don’t even know the facts. What a fucking travesty.”
My anticipatory musings didn’t impact my terp the way I hoped. “Dominoes, Lieutenant? What do dominoes have to do with this?”
To my front, Staff Sergeant Boondock heard his cue. “Did I hear our crazy-ass terp mention something about . . . bones?” I started laughing while he pressed the issue. “I sincerely recommend you make that happen, LT. Das Boot needs something to cheer him up after seeing that dead dog. That goofy German still looks like he’s going to cry. And it’s not like we got anything else going on. Let’s chai it up.”
We went back to the Sahwa ch
eckpoint for another game of dominoes and another round of chai. Soon, the events of this day were just another page of chicken scratch in my notepad. There they rested, festooned permanently with the smudged dirt of the desert, earmarked in case I ever needed to care again about that farm and those people and this day.
Into the notepad. It wasn’t like there was any other place for it to go.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Over the course of our deployment, only a few events continually stuck with me, keeping me up at night, weighing me down as mental anchors. The Sahwa firefight was one; almost losing Private Hot Wheels in June was another. Most everything else felt too surreal in memory, and those I buried away to be dealt with at a later date, at a time when I could afford to get lost in reflection and deliberation. The events of this night, though, I couldn’t bury, or even pretend to, temporarily or otherwise. They were that fucked up.
We spent the day pulling security on Route Maples for General Petraeus and his entourage so that the Pegasus himself could buy a falafel at the Saba al-Bor market. Immediately after the general left, flying by helicopter back to Baghdad, we moved straight into a night escort for an engineer unit tasked to fill the potholes on Route Lincoln, a key highway that led to Anbar to the west and Camp Taji to the east. The mission was straightforward enough—we would surround the engineers in a Stryker diamond and chill out while the concrete dried. The initial set of potholes was at the intersection of Routes Lincoln and Islanders, just south of the Grand Canal, on the northwestern corner of Saba al-Bor. We established our outer cordon security positions, the engineers went to work, and I prepared for a long, quiet night of waiting.
Five minutes later, Staff Sergeant Boondock’s voice ripped across the radio net.
“White 1, this is White 3. We got some real shady mother fuckers low-crawling onto the road, coming down from the canal. It looks like two . . . yeah, two personnel.”
I had been lying down in the back of my vehicle, reading T. E. Lawrence’s war memoir. I bolted straight up when I heard Staff Sergeant Boondock’s report and started studying my map. The White 3 vehicle was on the complete other side of the Stryker diamond, oriented due south, overwatching Route Islanders.
“Keep watching them,” I said, stating the obvious while I sorted through my conflicting thoughts.
Were they sure they’d seen two guys low-crawling? It was night. They still hadn’t done anything wrong yet. Technically. Not yet. Were they sure? Why were they low-crawling? A few units in the brigade had been shot at, ourselves included, but no one had shot back yet. There was a reason for that. After all the briefings and lectures about previous units’ war crimes, cover-ups, scandals, and prison sentences, everyone was trigger shy. No one would say it, but everyone felt it. Had I left my rules-of-engagement card in the laundry? Why were they low-crawling? Why couldn’t we just shoot, again? They hadn’t displayed any hostile purpose. Yet. It wasn’t just night, it was midnight. Farmers wandered around that road all the time. So did kids. But it was midnight. I used to sneak out at midnight as a kid. Staff Sergeant Boondock said they were shady. Were he and his men sure? Could they be sure with night vision? Could they ever be sure with night vision? Were they fucking sure?
“Any heat signatures?” I sputtered out.
Five or so seconds passed before Staff Sergeant Boondock responded. “Roger! Roger! My golf [gunner] reports that they have set down a boxlike object 250 meters from our position.”
Three simple words hung on my tongue like a swing: Light them up. A quick burst or two of 50-caliber machine gun rounds would suffice. Although I had come to Iraq prepared to kill, I hadn’t come needing to. But now—kill or be killed. Never had this war been so clear, so pure, so obvious, so clean. Light. Them. Up.
But I didn’t give that order. I couldn’t. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Not yet. They hadn’t dug anything yet and thus hadn’t emplaced anything. I couldn’t stop thinking about the investigation a shooting would inevitably initiate, a truth that mortified me later in hindsight. I understood that such retrospective studies were usually healthy for a military unit, and I was more than familiar with the COIN principles of precision and restraint. Part of what made an American soldier an American soldier was that he fought with rules that sometimes hindered him in an attempt to keep sight of the ideals and principles that led him to fight in the first place. But I also understood that events that started out just like this became war crimes. I knew that events that started out just like this led to soldiers going to jail. The blunt truth of it all was that we had no idea who was actually down on Route Islanders, and because of that, we couldn’t open fire. Everything was too grey, and we currently lived in a black-and-white world and served in a black-and-white army. It was still just too damn grey.
I kicked out my Bravo section’s dismounts, one team led by SFC Big Country, the other by Staff Sergeant Boondock. They stood behind the cover of their Strykers and were on order to move south to the two personnel’s location. I told Sergeant Axel, the 3 vehicle’s gunner, to beam the targets with a bright naked-eye laser in order to let them know we were watching. Then I told him, “If they start digging, or don’t stop whatever it is they’re doing, or do anything other than totally freeze, open fire and engage the targets.” There. I had satiated the gods of “what if” and found a way for my soldiers to still do their job. It was the best I could come up with under the circumstances.
Staff Sergeant Boondock (near) and Private Das Boot scan for enemy movement after hearing gunfire in the distance. As the Iraq War evolved into a counterinsurgency fight, the leadership of Coalition forces stressed to its troops on the ground to only fire their weapons after the target had been positively identified as an active combatant.
“Roger. Will comply!” Sergeant Axel responded.
I had given the order to kill. Haughty enough to condemn two individuals to The End because they had been dumb enough to be seen in a war of shadows. Somewhere in the time-space continuum, the boy who had cried after his first fistfight—not because he was hurt but because he thought he had done something to upset the instigator and didn’t yet understand the concept of bullying—hung himself with a calendar rope.
“X-ray, this is White 1.” It had been a few minutes since I had sent up a situation report to troop headquarters. Remembering to do so at this precise moment became my biggest regret of the whole ordeal. I still don’t know why I did it.
“This is X-ray.” It was one of the TOC NCOs.
“X-ray, we have a possible IED emplacement happening time now, at our location. Grid to follow. We’re employing ROE and will engage with fire if detainment is no longer a viable option.”
“Negative, White 1, you will not engage!” Captain Whiteback now spoke on the other end of the radio call. What the hell was he still doing up? I wondered. I wouldn’t have called this up if I’d thought he was still awake. “Attempt to detain the individuals. Do not open fire unless the individuals attempt to directly engage you.”
“This is White 1 . . . I copy the only way we can open fire, even after positive identification, is if these guys open fire at us with rifles or try to detonate the IED on us?”
“Roger,” came the reply. “You have to be absolutely sure.”
I sighed, disbelievingly, and switched back to the platoon net. “You monitor the commander’s traffic, 3-Golf?”
Sergeant Axel’s voice was so sharp, it could have cut through steel. “This is 3-Golf. Roger.”
I howled and ripped the hand mic out of our radio, throwing it into the back of the Stryker, waking up a very confused Suge. Truthfully, I was angrier at myself for calling up a situation report than I was with the commander for making a commander’s call. Sergeant Axel did as he was told and lasered the two shapes. They stood up and darted back into the canal. I instructed the two dismount teams to pursue them. After forty-five minutes of searching, nothing had been found but two sets of muddy footprints behind some broken reeds.
“What the fuck?” Sta
ff Sergeant Boondock raged over the radio. “It’s not like these goddamn mother fuckers are the fucking Vietcong and tunneled the fuck out of here. Where the fuck did they fucking go?” He was frustrated. We were all frustrated.
I instructed the dismount teams to move back north, sweeping the road, to investigate the boxlike object Sergeant Axel had initially spotted. Specialist Tunnel and Private First Class Das Boot (recently promoted) stumbled over a compact, bricklike object covered in tumbleweeds on the east side of the road.
“What’s that?” Specialist Tunnel asked.
“I don’t know,” PFC Das Boot said. He leaned down, pulled aside the tumbleweeds, scratched, and sniffed.
Staff Sergeant Boondock walked up behind the soldiers. “What the fuck are you guys doing? Das Boot, are you high? Back the fuck away from that thing!”
After marking the object with Chem-Lights, the army term for glowsticks, we called EOD and waited. In the mean time, the engineer unit had finished up their pothole fillings, so they waited with us. EOD arrived an hour later, and it turned out the brick was a medium-sized pressure-plate EFP designed specifically to penetrate Coalition force armored vehicles. EOD detonated it without incident, and we continued our escort mission deep into the night. We didn’t finish up until four in the morning, and we all went straight to bed. No one said anything to anyone about what had happened. There wasn’t really anything to say.
The next day, the platoon played enough of the Guitar Hero video game that they didn’t care about the rules of engagement incident anymore. I still did. While talking on the back porch, Staff Sergeant Boondock told me that he wouldn’t have given the order to engage like I had. I didn’t believe him. He also said that the rules now were too constrained, too political, totally different from his last tour in Iraq, and that no Joe’s life was worth one lousy dead hajji.
“Shit’s always clear in hindsight, sir,” he said. “Nothing made sense last night, and that’s a fucking fact. All that matters is that we’re all still here. If this is the most fucked up thing we deal with on this deployment, we’ve had it easy.”
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